Elsevier

Addictive Behaviors

Volume 35, Issue 12, December 2010, Pages 1074-1082
Addictive Behaviors

Preventing disruptive boys from becoming heavy substance users during adolescence: A longitudinal study of familial and peer-related protective factors

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.addbeh.2010.07.008Get rights and content

Abstract

Childhood disruptiveness is one of the most important antecedents of heavy substance use in adolescence, especially among boys. The first aim of the present study is to verify whether parental monitoring and friend conventionality protect disruptive boys from engaging in heavy substance-use in adolescence. The second purpose is to examine whether these protective effects are strengthened by attachment to parents or friends respectively. Finally, the third objective is to verify whether the expected protective effect of parental monitoring could be mediated through exposure to conventional friends. A sample of 1037 boys from low socioeconomic neighbourhoods was followed from childhood (age 6) to adolescence (age 15). Parent, teacher, and self-reported measures were used to measure disruptiveness, parental monitoring, family attachment, friend conventionality, and attachment to friends. Results suggest that parental monitoring and friends' conventionality mitigated the relationship between childhood disruptiveness and adolescence heavy substance use. Exposure to conventional friends further mediated the protective effect of parent monitoring. The postulated enhancement of attachment quality on the protective effect of parents or peer behaviors was not confirmed, but low attachment was related to heavier substance use in highly monitored disruptive boys. Parental monitoring, family attachment, and peer conventionality are factors amenable to intervention, and thus represent promising targets for future prevention strategies aimed at-risk boys. Our results underscore the importance of simultaneously addressing the behavioral and the affective dimensions in interventions with parents.

Research Highlights

►Parent monitoring and peer conventionality protected disruptive boys from heavy substance use. ►Disruptive boys who were highly monitored but poorly attached to parents showed heavier use. ►Peer conventionality mediated the protective effect of parent monitoring on disruptive boys. ►Peer conventionality buffered the association between attachment to friends and heavy use.

Introduction

Heavy substance use in adolescence can have important individual (Kandel et al., 1986, Windle & Davies, 1999), and social consequences (Rehm et al., 2006). Alcohol and drug use among adolescents is highly prevalent. Yet only a small proportion of adolescent users abuse alcohol or drugs (Shedler & Block, 1990, Steinberg, 2008a). As children, they were often disruptive (Dobkin et al., 1997, Glantz & Pickens, 1992, King et al., 2004).

Childhood disruptiveness (e.g., aggressiveness, opposition, and hyperactivity) is not only related to substance abuse in adolescence, but also to several other problem behaviors (Nagin, & Tremblay, 1999), including delinquency, school difficulties, and dropout (Ensminger, & Slusarcick, 1992). A consensus amongst theories of development is that childhood disruptiveness predicts early and stable trajectories of multiple problem behaviors, and substance misuse particularly in boys (Hinshaw et al., 1993, Li et al., 2001, Loeber, 1988, Moffitt, 1993, Patterson, 1986, Patterson et al., 1989, Zucker, 1994).

Typically, boys with low behavioral control get rejected by prosocial peers and turn to deviant peers, which could foster the initiation and maintenance of substance use (Patterson, 1986, Patterson et al., 1989). Yet, not all disruptive boys show the same psychosocial outcomes in adolescence and adulthood. Some high-risk individuals unexpectedly “defy the odds” and develop into relatively well-adjusted adults (Luthar et al., 2000, Rutter, 1990, Werner & Smith, 1992). This is in line with the principle of multifinality and suggests that protective factors may intervene in the lives of some individuals.

Past research has found that parenting practices can protect disruptive boys from abusing substances. Parental monitoring of child activities, in particular, has been found to protect adolescents with an alcoholic father from drug and alcohol problems (Vitaro, Tremblay, & Zoccolillo, 1999). Adolescents who report feeling emotionally detached and autonomous from their families are also less likely to consume alcohol if their parents provide adequate supervision (Bray, Adams, Getz, & Stovall, 2001). Yet, some studies have found that parental monitoring has no effect or even exacerbates the effect of some prior risk factors (Crosnoe et al., 2002, Marshal & Chassin, 2000). This suggests that a third variable might play a moderating role. Attachment to parents could influence how children respond to parental monitoring. For instance, adolescents who are attached to their parents might respond positively to parental monitoring efforts. Conversely, adolescents who are less attached might react negatively to parent supervision leading to more problem behaviors.

Peers also exert a major influence on youth behaviors. The social development model (Hawkins, & Weis, 1985) stipulates that peer influence becomes increasingly important throughout the course of adolescence in comparison to familial influences. According to the peer cluster theory (Oetting & Beauvais, 1986a, Oetting & Beauvais, 1986b, Oetting & Beauvais, 1987), peers play a central role in the etiology of drug abuse. As such they may explain the link between parental monitoring and drug use. The influence of peers is likely to operate through a deviancy training process to be described below. In addition, according to the socio-interactional model, the influence of peers may exacerbate the link between individual characteristics such as early disruptiveness and later drug abuse (Dishion, 1990, Dishion & Patterson, 1997). According to this model, disruptive boys are at risk for several negative outcomes but their risk may be further increased by exposure to deviant friends who may reinforce their deviant behavioral tendencies. Consistent with these ideas, empirical research has pointed out that having drug using peers strongly predicts adolescent substance use, especially in teenagers that were disruptive as children (Chassin et al., 2002, Erickson et al., 2000, Windle, 2000). As mentioned, the effect of deviant peers may be explained by deviancy training. This process involves the reciprocal reinforcement and modeling of delinquent talk, behavior, attitudes, and values amongst deviant peers which results in an escalation of problem behaviors among adolescent (Dodge, Dishion, & Lansford, 2006). In the absence of deviant peers, however, this process is not possible. Hypothetically, it could be even replaced by an opposite process if a child was surrounded with prosocial peers. This opposite process could be in the form of conformity training whereby peers influence each other positively. There is some evidence that exposure to non deviant peers decreases the risk of alcohol abuse and illicit drug use among adolescents with a history of childhood hyperactivity (Marshal, Molina, & Pelham, 2003). In the context of the present study, this finding suggests that peer conventionality could act as a protecting influence for children presenting an early disruptive profile. This might be the case especially if adolescents are highly attached to these peers.

Indeed, children with greater attachment to family and peers may be more receptive to their influence (Bandura, 1986, Vitaro et al., 2009). This idea is supported by the social development model, in which social bonding is believed to play an important role between an adolescent's social relationships and changes in their behaviors (Catalano & Hawkins, 1996, Lonczak et al., 2001)). As such, bonding processes, such as attachment could interact with parenting or friend characteristics to influence substance use among disruptive boys. A similar idea is supported by the parenting styles model (Baumrind, 1978, Maccoby & Martin, 1983), which states that two dimensions of parental behavior interact to shape four styles of parenting. The first dimension is parental responsiveness, or parental warmth, and refers to the degree to which the parent responds to their child needs in a supportive and accepting way. The second dimension is parental demandingness, or control, and refers to the extent to which parents expects mature behavior from their child, and apply supervision and disciplinary measures (Baumrind, 1991). The combination of responsiveness and demandingness, called authoritative parenting has been found to protect adolescents from antisocial peer exposure more than each dimension alone (Walker-Barnes, & Mason, 2004). Conversely, non-authoritative parenting has been related to adolescent involvement with deviant friends (Adamczyk-Robinette, Fletcher, & Wright, 2002) and the development of emotional and behavioral problems (Dishion, Nelson, & Bullock, 2004). Despite the general applicability of these findings, adolescents seem to react in different ways to the same parenting style depending on their behavioral profile, suggesting the importance of individual differences. For example, disruptive adolescents with low parental support and low parental control showed the highest levels of behavior problems, including illicit substance use (Stice, & Gonzales, 1998). Parental support has also been found to exert a buffering effect on the association between behavioral under control and substance abuse or dependence diagnosis among children of alcoholics (King, & Chassin, 2004).

Attachment to friends could also amplify the extent to which adolescents reproduce these friends' behaviors. For instance, adolescents who are exposed to substance-using friends and who share a positive relationship with them are at higher risks for substance use (Hussong, & Hicks, 2003). The opposite could also be true: a positive relationship and strong attachment to conventional friends could amplify these friends' positive influence.

Finally, in line with the deviance proneness model of alcohol use (Sher, 1991), the expected protective effect of parental monitoring is likely to be mediated by friend conventionality. This model proposes that among children of alcoholics, behavioral under control and poor parental practices interact to increase the probability of problems such as affiliation with deviant peers, and eventually alcohol use. This hypothesis is also supported by the finding that improved quality of parenting during adolescence decreases delinquent behaviors among early oppositional adolescents, but only through better choice of friends (i.e., not affiliating with deviant peers) (Simons, Chao, Conger, & Elder, 2001).

The first aim of the present study is to verify whether parental monitoring and friend conventionality protect disruptive boys from engaging in heavy substance-use in adolescence. The second purpose is to examine whether these protective effects are strengthened by attachment to parents or friends respectively. Finally, the third objective is to verify whether the expected protective effect of parental monitoring could be mediated through exposure to conventional friends.

Data for the present study were obtained from a sample of low socioeconomic status inner city boys. Multiple informants provided measures of early disruptiveness and later substance misuse. Protective factors likely to modify the relationship between childhood disruptiveness and later heavy substance use are considered in early adolescence (ages 12–14), just before the average age at which teenagers initiate alcohol and drug use. By measuring the influence of protective factors in early adolescence it is thus possible to identify protective factors that could become the target of intervention in later studies.

Section snippets

Sample

Participants were part of an ongoing longitudinal study that began in 1984. The initial sample included 1037 kindergarten boys of 6 years of age (M = 6.0, SD = 0.27) attending schools in low socioeconomic neighbourhoods of Montreal, Quebec. These boys represented 87% of the boys in all 53 schools from low socioeconomic neighbourhoods in the city. Selection criteria for participants ensured homogeneity of gender, ethnicity (Caucasian) and socioeconomic background. Participants with missing values

Descriptive statistics and bivariate correlations

As shown in Table 1, bivariate correlations among study variables revealed a pattern consistent with our expectations and with findings from prior research. Significant coefficients went from 0.06 to 0.47. Means and standard deviation are also shown in Table 1.

Analysis and treatment of missing data

Missing data are a common problem of longitudinal designs. The mean number of cases with missing data on each variable is 80 (ranging from 0 for disruptiveness to 147 for heavy substance use). In order to assess the influence of missing

Discussion

Children with an early disruptive profile are at an elevated risk for developing problem behaviors including heavy substance use in adolescence. From a prevention perspective, it is important to understand how their particular risk for developing negative outcomes can be reduced. In this study, we sought to identify factors that could protect at risk disruptive boys from engaging in heavy substance use in adolescence. From a social learning and social control perspectives (Bandura, 1986,

Role of funding sources

This research was made possible by grants from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the National Health Research and Development Program, and the Fonds Québécois de Recherche sur la Société et la Culture. These Funding agencies had no role in the study design, collection, analysis or interpretation of the data, writing the manuscript, or the decision to submit the paper for publication.

Contributors

Authors A, B, C and E designed the study. Author A conducted the statistical analysis and wrote the various versions of the manuscript with author C. Author D conducted literature searches, provided summaries of previous research studies and assisted in writing. Authors E and F were responsible for the planning and the collection of the data. All authors have proof-read and approved the final manuscript.

Conflict of interest

All authors declare that they have no conflicts of interest.

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank Ms. Caroline Fitzpatrick who assisted in the proof-reading of the manuscript and provided thoughtful comments. The authors also wish to thank the authorities and directors of schools at the Montreal Catholic School Board as well as the teachers, children and parents for their first-rate collaboration. Lyse Desmarrais-Gervais and Maria Rosa deserve our thanks for their participation in the collection or analysis of the data.

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